Update: Scott Sumner has an excellent comment on Christina Romer, where he pays tribute to the great Bennett McCallum. Some thing I naturally appreciate very much given the attention that I have been giving to McCallum and the McCallum rule myself.

David Beckworth also has a comment on Romer (and some Baseball stuff an European like me can’t understand…)

Desolation Jones

Macro is going to be awfully boring once NGDP path targeting is implemented. These past two years I read up heavily on monetary theory just for fun, and all that new found knowledge is going to be useless once we have a smooth running economy. I guess there’s still growth theory, but that makes me want to fall asleep.

DJ, that is so right. I NGDP level targeting could more or less kill off all macroeconomic discussion. In fact that is exactly what happened during the Great Moderation. When US NGDP was growing at 5-51/2 most macroeconomic discussion disappeared. Say’s Law will be all you need to know.

But lets see – my feeling is we are quite far away from winning this battle. There are still a lot of monetary dysfunctional countries around even if one or two countries starts targeting NGDP.

And then remember – it was New Zealand that was first to introduce inflation targeting. That is 20 years ago and most Western countries with floating exchange rates have followed suit and so have many Emerging Markets, but the Fed still is not really targeting anything.So lets see whether Bernanke & Co. will be moving anywhere soon.